“This exhibition is meant to remind people who are standing there and are crying out for help“. To speak thus to the Adnkronos is the photographer Laura Salvinelli, whose “Afghana” exhibition brings the stories and faces of women in Afghanistan to the Rome Film Festival. “I and all the people who have worked in Afghanistan are flooded with messages of request for help, desperate and threatened women, who live hidden in the cellars or in the homes of relatives, and beg Italy to let them come here, to bring the daughters to study “, says Salvinelli.
“Those who have worked with foreigners live under threat. The Taliban certainly conduct retaliatory operations away from the cameras,” continues the photographer, stressing how the repression against journalists makes it difficult to document. “The women who demonstrate in front of the cameras are very brave, but paradoxically they risk less than those in the villages”.
Salvinelli’s shots, with texts by Virginia Vicario, were made in 2019 in the Emergency Maternity Center in Panjshir. They tell the story of doctors, nurses and patients through the smiling face of Zarghona who gave birth to the first son, of Kemeya struggling with her fifth caesarean, of Kuchi nomad women during one of their seasonal passages in the Valley. But they are also the story of a virtuous model with the training of female doctors, midwives and nurses, which has resulted in female empowerment within society, their families. A model that the advent of the Taliban endangers.
Salvinelli has been in Afghanistan seven times since 2003, with governmental and non-governmental humanitarian organizations. His ambition is to create “reportages” that combine the empathy of the portrait with reportage. In the shots taken at the Maternity Center in Anabah in the Panjshir Valley “I worked in a world where photographing women is taboo,” she says. But I also “fought to show birth photos in our world, which violate another taboo, that of the blood of life and the real body of women. I have constantly asked myself the question of all photographers: whether it is right to enter into the intimacy of others. I believe that the answer, always different, depends on why and how it is done. The important thing is that that question always works within us. “
In Afghanistan, maternal mortality is 99 times higher than that recorded in Italy and the infant mortality rate 47 times higher: one in 14 women dies from complications related to pregnancy, while one in 18 children dies before reaching the age of 5.
The maternity center founded by Emergency in Panjshir in 2003 is still today the only specialized and free structure in the area that allows women the necessary training to become nurses, gynecologists, midwives and guarantees the female population to give birth in a safe hospital, a protected oasis where men have no access, and which becomes a place to take care of themselves for both patients and staff. More than 7,000 births are performed here every year: since it came into operation in June 2003, to December 2020, more than 86,000 women have been hospitalized in the Center and more than 65,000 children have been born.
The Afghan Exhibition can be visited with free admission in the foyer of the Auditorium Parco della Musica from 14 to 24 October with opening from 10.00 to 18.00. From 6.00 pm until the end of the screenings you can only access if you have a ticket to watch the films. In any case it will be necessary to show the Green Pass.